Dave Long writes: > > a propagation delay averaging about half a second ... > > which is tail(1)'s fault; if one really cared, and had a usleep(1), > another sh read loop would handle output w/o the noticable delay.
tail has a -s option which could benefit from accepting floating-point numbers, which would eliminate that problem. > 1/ C++ programmers switching to Lisp should do just fine! In my experience, C++ programmers are not very good at getting good performance --- or their C++ is very C-ish. > 2/ Is it only Lisp programmers switching to C who reimplement half a > Common Lisp because they think that, until a program can be > expressed at a high level of abstraction, it's not done? Your statement is somewhat ambiguous; perhaps only Lisp programmers do it for that reason, but dyed-in-the-wool C programmers do it too, for a different reason. I suspect Lisp programmers doing it would tend to do it in a better-thought-out way. > Perhaps because C programmers are used to it being unusual for a > simple program text to be difficult for the iron. > ... > it is probably also the mark of an inexperienced tool vendor to > force discovery of the "correct way" by abysmal performance for the > "first-glance way". What's the alternative? As in C, to require tasks that are difficult for the iron to be expressed verbosely? Sometimes I want to do tasks that inherently take a lot of computation, and I prefer to be able to express them as concisely as possible. Thus SQL, awk, regexes, and Common Lisp. > The modern world progresses by an increase in the things that are > successfully done ineptly. How old is this idea? -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> We have always been quite clear that Win95 and Win98 are not the systems to use if you are in a hostile security environment. -- Paul Leach The Internet is hostile. -- Paul Leach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
